CNN Op-Ed: ‘Mueller’s Report Looks Bad For Obama’

On Oct. 28, 2013, President Barack Obama and James Comey participate in the installation ceremony for Mr. Comey as FBI director at the bureau’s Washington headquarters. PHOTO: CHARLES DHARAPAK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Amazing that CNN would allow such blasphemy to appear on their site and remain for any length of time.

The Mueller Report makes it clear that Russia’s interference began in 2014. Yet the Obama administration took no steps to end it. The author, Scott Jennings, believes that because Obama was determined to forge a deal with Iran at the time, and needed Russia’s cooperation to do so, he failed to call them out.

Even Obama’s supporters felt he should have taken measures to stop the interference. The repellent Rep. Adam Schiff said, “the Obama administration should have done a lot more.”

According to the Washington Post, one of Obama’s senior advisors admitted that they “sort of choked” in “failing to stop the Russian government’s brazen activities.”

That makes sense for the early period of interference, however, what would explain the administration’s deliberate decision not to act as late as the summer of 2016?

We need to take this a little further. In August 2016, Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice was said to have told staff members to “stand down” in their efforts to thwart Russian meddling in our 2016 election. (I posted about this here.)

In testimony last June before the Senate Intelligence Committee, former Obama administration cyber security coordinator Michael Daniel confirmed this.

Journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn published a book last year entitled “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump” which also confirms the claim.

Susan Rice, obviously acting on Obama’s behalf, issued the stand down order shortly after the Obama FBI had opened their investigation into possible collusion between then-candidate Donald Trump and the Russians and at the same time Strzok was texting Page about the infamous “insurance policy.”

Although Hillary Clinton had a significant lead in the polls at that time, they still needed to lay the groundwork for what FBI official Peter Strzok referred to as their “insurance” policy. Considered in this context, the order starts to make sense.

Strzok sent the following text to FBI lawyer Lisa Page, his paramour, in August 2016.

I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.

Finally, after the 2016 election, Obama placed sanctions on the Russian government, but they were weak at best and they came way too late to have any effect.

In addition to ignoring Russian interference in our election, the Obama administration failed to act while Putin wreaked havoc in Syria or when he marched his troops into Crimea. Jennings wonders whether or not the potential “collusion” narrative may have been “invented” to cover up the Obama administration’s failures.

Jennings writes:

Two years have been spent fomenting the idea that Russia only interfered because it had a willing, colluding partner: Trump. Now that Mueller has popped that balloon, we must ask why this collusion narrative was invented in the first place.

Given Obama’s record on Russia, one operating theory is that his people needed a smokescreen to obscure just how wrong they were. They’ve blamed Trump.

But the Mueller report makes it clear that the Russian interference failure was Obama’s alone. He was the commander-in-chief when all of this happened. In 2010, he and Eric Holder, his Attorney General, declined to prosecute Julian Assange, who then went on to help Russia hack the Democratic National Committee’s emails in 2016. He arguably chose to prioritize his relationship with Putin vis-à-vis Iran over pushing back against Russian election interference that had been going on for at least two years.

If you consider Russian election interference a crisis for our democracy, then you cannot read the Mueller report, adding it to the available public evidence, and conclude anything other than Barack Obama spectacularly failed America. Subsequent investigations of this matter should explore how and why Obama’s White House failed, and whether they invented the collusion narrative to cover up those failures.

I agree with Jennings theory. But I also firmly believe that as Peter Strzok and his associates were building their case against Trump in the summer of 2016, the Obama administration’s pertinent policy decisions, especially regarding Russian election interference, were dictated by what was required to put the “insurance policy” into place. Considering the roles that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan played in this conspiracy, this scenario becomes even more plausible.